Haptic internet is seen as the next step on mobile networking. Users are currently able to efficiently communicate over voice and video, but in the future networked society, it is envisioned that people will be able to communicate the sense of touch via haptic devices. There has been a large amount of research on devices, which allow such communication to take place. Several haptic interfaces are now appearing in the market, which deliver haptic feedback using different actuation technologies such as ultrasound, vibrotactile, electrostatic and piezoelectric.
Haptic perception consists of both kinesthetic and tactile sense and relates to the sensation of the size, shape, mass, texture and stiffness of physical objects, surfaces, etc. Kinesthetic information refers to the information perceived when moving joints, muscles and tendons, while tactile information refers to information retrieved via the skin. In a haptic system, the amount of data representing all the sensors quickly becomes large. Hence, data compression is needed to keep the data transfer requirements at a reasonable level. However, the data compression and decompression can introduce delays. Since any delay can seriously reduce the experience of the user, any compression and decompression which is used should be designed such that the amount of delay which is introduced is as small as possible.
R. Chaudhariu, C. Schuwerk, M. Danaei, and E. Steinbach, “Perceptual and Bitrate-scalable Coding of Haptic Surface Texture Signals,” IEEE J. Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 462-473, 2015, discloses a bitrate scalable haptic texture codec, which incorporates a masking model based on weaker signals close in frequency to a powerful signal being masked.